Two central problems of the
scholarship on Sarah Orne Jewett have been whether she is a
realist and how to explain the "plotless" structure of her short
stories and such longer works as Deephaven and The
Country of the Pointed Firs. An examination of Jewett's
critical theory sheds considerable light on these problems, even
though Jewett never formally articulated her critical ideas;
they are found scattered through her correspondence, mainly in
the form of advice to such younger writers as Willa Cather, John
Thaxter, and Andress S. Floyd. Comments she made on works she
was reading and on her own work appear primarily in letters to
Annie Adams Fields. Early letters to editors and early diary
notations, still unpublished, are further sources
of her critical theory.1

One of the central elements in
Jewett's literary credo was that the artist should transmit
reality with as little interference and doctoring up as
possible. This idea, at the heart of the realist doctrine of mimesis,
Jewett apparently learned from her father. On numerous
occasions when giving counsel to other writers she stated: "My
dear father used to say to me very often, 'Tell things just
as they are!…'The great messages and discoveries of
literature come to us, they write us, and we do not
control them in a certain sense:"2
One of two aphorisms of Flaubert she had tacked up on her
secretary read: "Écrire la vie ordinaire comme on écrit l'histoire."3 The artist's job is to
"write" ordinary life as if writing history. Similar to her
father's injunction the implication in Flaubert's statement is
that the writer neutrally or objectively recounts events with
minimal comment, arrangement, or literary artifice.

Jewett reacted strongly against any
writing that seemed to be pretentiously "arty" -- that is, that
revealed a self-conscious effort on the part of the author to be
"literary," to use established literary devices and forms. She
once convicted Nathaniel Hawthorne of just this failing in his American
Notebooks (1868),
deploring the author's "conscious effort after material." The
sketches, she said, "lack any reality or imagination, rootless
little things that could never open seed in their turn . . . so
'delicate' in their fancy as to be far-fetched and oddly feeble
and sophomorish" (Fields, Letters, 73).

By contrast Jewett
prefers Charles W. Brewster's Rambles About Portsmouth (first
series, 1859; second series, 1869), acompletely
unliterary collection of sketches which she finds "a mine of
wealth." As an example she notes a "description of the
marketwomen coming down the river, -- their quaintness and
picturesqueness at once seems to be so great, and the mere hints
of description so full of flavor, that it all gave me much
keener pleasure than anything I found in the other much more
famous book [by Hawthorne]." She recognizes that such a view is
"high literary treason" but predicts that Brewster's work will
outlive Hawthorne's because of the veracity of its realism.
"Such genuine books always live, they get filled so full of
life" (Fields, Letters, 72). Theartist must not
only transmit reality as faithfully as possible, but the images
that are selected must "in their turn" "open seed." This thesis,
issued in 1890, became
during the 1890sJewett's central artistic theory.

On various occasions Jewett enjoined
younger writers against self-consciously following established
literary norms. She told John Thaxter not to "write a `story'
but just tell the thing!" (Cary, Letters, 120).
In other words, the artist should try to eliminate the
artificial construct, "story," from mind in order to directly
transmit the reality in question. Implicit in this thesis is the
idea that form follows function (that is, content and purpose),
rather than the other way around.

Similar counsel to that given Thaxter
was offered to Willa Cather. In a newspaper interview published
in 1913 after Jewett's death Cather recalled that Jewett had
advised, "Don't try to write the kind of short story that this
or that magazine wants -- write the truth, and let them take it
or leave it": "Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this
or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way -- you will have
to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don't
let that frighten you."4
"Story-writing," Jewettonce noted, "is always
experimental . . . and that something which does itself
isthe vitality of it" (Fields, Letters, 118).

Jewett, therefore, proposes a theory
of the artist as one who is a relatively passive transmitter of
"things as they are," who ideally imposes as little artifice as
possible upon the material, and who does not consciously follow
literary precedents but evolves formal devices appropriate to
her own purpose.

Such a theory may be particularly
congenial to the female talent. In her second preface to Pilgrimage
(1938) Dorothy Richardson, a pioneer of literary modernism (and
in particular of the anti-authorial "stream of consciousness"
technique), explained that she had proposed in her fiction to
produce "a feminine equivalent of the current masculine
realism." What she particularly disliked in the masculine style,
according to Leon Edel, was the presence of the male author
intruding upon the subject matter: "Bang, bang, bang," she
wrote, "on they go, these men's books, like an L. C. C. tram,
yet unable to make you forget them, the authors, for a moment."
She also deplored what she saw as the "self-satisfied,
complacent, know-all condescendingness" of the masculine
narrator in Conrad and James.5

Margaret Fuller suggested decades
earlier that women are more inclined toward the kind of process
Jewett advocates than toward the rigidly controlling authorial
process that Richardson condemns in "masculine realism."
"[Woman] excels . . . in . . . a simple breathing out of what
she receives, that has the singleness of life, rather than the
selecting and energizing of art."6

A considerable body of contemporary
theory has recently developed that suggests that women's
historical experience may have inclined them toward "a mode of
thinking" that is, as Carol Gilligan
recently put it, "contextual and inductive rather than formal
and abstract."7 Kathryn Allen
Rabuzzi, in The Sacred and the Feminine: Towards a Theology
of Housework (1982), has proposed that out of their
housebound experience women have developed a "mode of being"
that is quite different from the masculine mode of questing,
conquering, and imposing one's will. The feminine mode is one of
waiting; it involves a kind of passive responsiveness to the
environment: "Responding in this way . . . is markedly different
from imposing your own will . . . . The passivity so induced is
that of a light object thrown into the water; it is not the
object that determines its direction, but the movement of the water.8 Such a response contrasts to
the "assertive striving more typical of the masculine temporal
mode, questing."9

Rabuzzi suggests that traditional
literary modes have been evolved to convey the typical masculine
activity of the quest. Yet, "both history and story,
traditionally so full of quests as to be virtually synonymous
with them, may not be formally appropriate to express
traditional feminine experience. In fact, both forms may so
consistently have obscured women's experiences in the waiting
mode as to have rendered women largely invisible not just to
men, but to themselves."10 Jewett
fashioned a formal structure that expresses the kind of
serendipitously passive mode that Rabuzzi sees as characteristic
of the feminine experience. Jewett's critical theory -- both her
notion of the passive artist and her concept of "imaginative
realism" -- provided the rationale for the formal structure she
developed in her fiction.

Jewett did not, of course, view the
artist as a completely passive machine that simply records
surrounding reality. Her injunctions about the noninterfering
artist must be seen as relative statements; the artist must be
comparatively restrained in the transposition of the material.
But Jewett was aware that the material is filtered through a
selecting mind. Indeed, a second major component of her critical
theory is that the artist must develop a point of view, an
authentic vision, a clear sustaining design or telos.

One of the more pointed criticisms
that Jewett made in this regard was of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
novel The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862),a work
that she had much admired in her youth.11 As an adult, however, she
found the work lacked integrity, an overall design. "Alas, that
she couldn't finish it in the same noble key of simplicity and
harmony .... [The result is] a divine touch here and there in an
incomplete piece of work" (Fields, Letters, 47). Here
Jewett is expressing an Aristotelian precept, that of dianoia,
or unity of thought: a work of art must evince a
consistency, an underlying unity.12
A work like the Pearl, which Stowe had composed on and
off over a period of a decade, provides a profusion of somewhat
haphazardly related events that are not properly integrated.

Jewett believed that the author must
develop a personal point of view, an authentic perspective
through which the material is selected and according to which it
is weighed and arranged. "The trouble with most realism," Jewett
complained in an 1890 letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "is that
it isn't seen from any point of view at all, and so its shadows
fall in every direction and it fails of being art" (Fields, Letters,
79). Jewett explicitly rejected the naturalist
theory offered by Emile Zola, who carried the notion of artistic
objectivity much further than Jewett found acceptable. In Le
Roman expérimental (1880) Zola urged an analogy between
the writer and the scientist; each retains objective neutrality
toward his or her "experimental" matter. Jewett rejected the
lack of moral perspective that such a thesis seemed to entail.
Speaking with enthusiasm in 1889 of Thackeray's Vanity Fair
(one of her favorite works) Jewett noted how "full [it is]
of splendid scorn for meanness and wickedness, which the Zola
school seems to lack" (Fields, Letters, 55-56). Many of
Jewett's early works are, indeed, imbued with strong moral
messages, despite her early self-remonstrance to follow Charles
Lamb's advice not to be too preachy. In her 1872diary
she resolved to confine herself to "silent scripture" in future work.13

It was not, however, just a moral
perspective, but a personal viewpoint gleaned from experience
that she believed a writer must bring to the material. In
much-cited counsel she told the novice Willa Cather that she
must first see the "world" before she could describe the "parish."14 In 1908 she urged Cather
to step back in order to develop perspective on her material.
"You don't see [it] yet quite enough from the outside, -- you
stand right in the middle . . . without having the standpoint of
the looker-on . . ." (Fields, Letters, 248). It takes
time for such a process to occur: "The thing that teases the
mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down
rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."15

Yet the process is essentially one
that happens to the artist, rather than the artist consciously
arranging it:

Good heavens! What a
wonderful kind of chemistry it is that evolves all the details
of a story and writes them presently in one flash of time!
For two weeks Ihave
been noticing a certain string of things and having hints of
character, etc., and day before yesterday the plan of the story
comes into my mind, and in half an hour I have put all the
little words and ways into their places and can read it off to
myself like print. Who does it? For I grow more and more sure
that Idon't! (Fields, Letters, 51-52)

The process is nevertheless personal, and the product is imbued
with the personality of the creator: "It is, after all, Miss
Thackeray herself in Old Kensington who gives the book
its charm" (Cary, Letters,
52).16 And, she concluded in advice given to
Rose Lamb: "one must have one's own method: it is the personal
contribution that makes true value in any form of art or work of
any sort" (Fields, Letters, 118).

The reality that Jewett was interested
in was, of course, life "in its everyday aspects"
(Cary, Letters, 51-52). "Adull little
village," she found, "is just the place to find the real drama
of life."17 But the reason such
commonplace material had interest was because there she found
intuitions of a transcendent order."18
In this theoretical perception, a third major aspect of her
theory, she came close to symbolist literary poetics.

Shortly before she published her
masterwork, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896),
Jewett used the phrase "imaginative realism" to explain her
artistic ideal to another aspiring writer, Andress S. Floyd
(Cary, Letters, 91). Although she does not elaborate in
the letter, written in 1894,it is clear from other
comments what the concept means. In her 1871diary
Jewett wrote:

Father said this one day "A story
should be managed so that it should suggest interesting
things to the reader instead of the author's doing all
the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and
white. The best compliment is for the reader to say `Why didn't
he put in "this" or "that."'"19

The implications of this statement lead away from realist doctrine
and point in the direction of symbolism, especially as it
developed in late nineteenth-century France. Symbolist poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, urged that the poet's job was to "suggest" rather than to "name."20
The other statement of Flaubert's that Jewett had before her when
she wrote offered counsel similar to her father's. "Ce n'est pas
de faire rire, ni de faire pleurer, ni de vous mettre à fureur,
mais d'agir à la façon de la nature, c'est à dire de faire rêver"
(Fields, Letters, 165).21 The
writer's job is to make one dream; that is, to make one aware of
another realm, a transcendent realm by means of images drawn from
earthly, everyday reality. This is what Jewett meant by
"imaginative realism."
Jewett's
symbolist inclinations may have been encouraged by her readings in
Emmanuel Swedenborg, in particular his theosophical doctrine of
correspondences. This theory, so fundamental to symbolist
poetics,22 claimed a correlation between the
"microcosm" and the "macrocosm;" that is, between this world "here
below" and a realm beyond. As a young writer, Jewett had been
introduced to Swedenborgianism by a mentor, Theophilus Parsons, a
Harvard professor. She once stated that she felt "a sense of it
under everything else" (Fields, Letters, 21-22).

Especially in her later work Jewett
was interested in depicting intuitions of a realm beyond this,
but she never erred in the direction of a didactic
Swedenborgianism (as did Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in Beyond
the Gates [1883] and The Gates Between [1886]).
The narrative of Captain Littlepage in The Country of
the Pointed Firs about the Arctic limbo with its
"fog-shaped" shades is a good example of the kind of intimations
Jewett sought. The land "between this world and the next"
described in the narrative is at such a remove, and the
narrators' reliability so dubious, that its reality remains
problematic. Thus, Jewett allows for only a suggestion of things
beyond.

When her friend poet Celia Thaxter
died, Jewett wondered "where imagination stops and consciousness
of the unseen begins, who can settle that even to one's self?"
(Fields, Letters, 110-11). It was not a literal
"heaven" that concerned her, but the hints of such transcendence
that are intuited within this world -- and the moral effects
that such intuitions have upon people. She once noted that she
found "something transfiguring in the best of friendship"
(Fields, Letters, 126). Her real concern was with
this kind of transcendence, and in this sense she was more of a
humanist than a symbolist, for she remained primarily concerned
with the moral dimension of human experiences of the
transcendent.

Yet Jewett wished to go beyond the
limits of realism. In an early comment on Jane Austen's
meticulous attention to detail Jewett complained, "all the
reasoning is done for you and all the thinking . . . . It seems
to me like hearing somebody talk on and on and on, while you
have no part in the conversation and merely listen" (Cary, Letters,
21). Later, in complimenting her friend Sarah Wyman
Whitman on her interpretation of "Martha's Lady" (1897), Jewett
noted, "You bring something to the reading of a story that [it]
would go very lame without .… It is," she asserted, "those
unwritable things that the story holds in its heart, if it has
any, that make the true soul of it, and these must be
understood, and yet how many a story goes lame for lack of that
understanding" (Fields, Letters, 112). Jewett,
therefore, extended her conception of authorial restraint to the
point where she allowed the reader a creative role in the
process. The author should not attempt to exert complete control
over the reader's thoughts, but rather attempt to communicate
images that "open seed" in the reader's mind, that allow the
reader to intuit meanings beyond the literal. Jewett's theory
thus provides for the feminine realism that Richardson envisaged
-- one in which the author is a relatively passive transmitter
who delegates, as it were, some of her authority and control to
the reader.

Jewett's "plotless" structure is
appropriate to this purpose. It is an essentially feminine
literary mode expressing a contextual, inductive sensitivity,
one that "gives in" to the events in question, rather than
imposing upon them an artificial, prefabricated "plot."

Jewett was not unaware, however, of
the dangers of an inductive, associative and relatively
undirected narrative style. In "Miss Debby's Neighbors" (1883)
she offers a complaint that the narrator's method "of going
around Robin Hood's barn between the beginning of her story and
its end can hardly be followed at
all . . . ."23 An earlier American
woman writer, Caroline Kirkland, once apologized for having used
a similarly feminine, gossipy style in A New Home -- Who'll
Follow? (1839): "This going back to take up dropped
stitches, is not the orthodox way of telling one's story; and if
I thought I could do any better, I would certainly go back and
begin at the very beginning; but I feel conscious that the truly
feminine sin of talking `about it and about it,' the
unconquerable partiality for wandering wordiness would cleave to
me still . . . ."24 At its worst a
"feminine" style of undirected meandering lacks the controlling
design -- the unity of thought -- necessary to significant art,
as Jewett herself noted. But this is not the case with
Kirkland's work, despite her fears. Nor is it the case with
Jewett's.

As a young writer Jewett worried about
her tendency toward plotlessness. In an early letter to her
editor, Horace Scudder, she noted,

I don't believe I could write a long story . . . . In
the first place, I have no dramatic talent. The story would have
no plot. I should have to fill it out with descriptions of
character and meditations. It seems to me I can furnish the
theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the
audience, but there never is any play! I could write you
entertaining letters perhaps, from some desirable house where I
was in most charming company, but I couldn't make a story about
it. (Cary, Letters, 29).

By the end of her career, as indicated in her advice to John
Thaxter, Jewett had come to the conclusion, however, that the
compulsion to "make a story" like stories done in the past
interfered with the genuine artistic process. By then she knew
that the form she had developed did not require a conventional
plot. This was because the conventional plot followed the typical
masculine activity of questing. As Rabuzzi notes, "it is plot that
strongly militates against story as an appropriate vehicle for
traditional women's experience." "By and large," she urges, "most
women have known a nonstoried existence. . . ." Jewett needed a
form appropriate to that existence.25

Rabuzzi's basic contention is that the
traditional female experience, that of being confined to the
domestic sphere and charged with the repetitive labor of
housework, created a sense of time that was markedly different
than the characteristically Western (and masculine) linear,
historical time of the quest -- the basis for traditional
"story." Rather, the housewife's time was closer to the sacred
time of myth, what Mircea Eliade called "illo tempore," or Henri
Bergson, "la durée." It is the "timeless" time of cyclic ritual,
the time of the "eternal return" (Eliade). The woman's
experience appears, therefore, static, and in a mode of waiting.
It is not progressive, or oriented toward events happening
sequentially or climactically, as in the traditional masculine
story plot. The feminine experience most essentially becomes
that of the sacredness of space, of time frozen
into stasis.26

If we consider Jewett's characteristic
plot patterns we will see that they are reflective of such an
experience: they are designed to reveal the sacredness that is
inherent in the everyday, and they express a static, or, at
most, a cyclical sense of movement. An early story, "Beyond the
Toll-Gate," which appears in Play Days (1878), clearly
establishes this pattern: a young girl ventures out of her
house, beyond her domestic confines only to discover two kindly
older women who treat her with beneficence; she returns home
then with this knowledge. It is a cyclical plot in which the
central figure returns home, having learned of the existence of
benign female space.

One of the primary plot patterns in
Jewett's works is that of a relatively sophisticated urban
woman, usually a Jewett persona, traveling to the country where
she experiences an epiphany -- where she learns something --
before returning to her urban home. The rural realm came to
symbolize for Jewett the world of the traditional woman, a world
of timeless ritual, of time frozen into space. In Jewett's
historical circumstances it was a world of the mothers'
generation, for, as I explore in New England Local Color Literature,27
the daughters' generation -- of which Jewett was a member -- in
the latter part of the nineteenth century was moving away from
the traditional realm. Jewett herself, as a professional woman
anchored at least part of the year in the sophisticated Boston
circle of Annie Fields, necessarily came to feel a certain
distance from the rural matriarchal world, but it remained the
place where she experienced spiritual regeneration, and it
remained the spiritual fount of her art.

This typical Jewett plot pattern was
established in her earliest work. Deephaven (1877) is
structured upon the visit of two urban girls to a coastal town
in Maine one summer. An early sketch included in that work, "My
Lady Brandon and the Widow Jim" (probably written in 1873)
establishes the archetypal structure that Jewett was to use over
and over. The story opens with a meandering meditation by the
I-narrator (Helen Denis -- a Jewett persona) about her friend,
Kate Lancaster; her great-aunt, Miss Brandon; and about "gentlewomen
of the old school."28 None of this
is irrelevant to the story that follows or to Deephaven, if
one considers that the work is about the girls' maturation. The
various people they meet serve as examples of figures whom life
has harrowed. From these exempla the girls gain wisdom; they
achieve a measure of spiritual growth. In this story they meet a
Mrs. Patton, "the Widow Jim," who in the divagitating fashion of
feminine oral history tells her story. The story ends with the
revelation by another neighbor, Mrs. Dockum, that Mrs. Patton
had been the victim of wife abuse. The girls also discover that
country people are more in tune with the transcendent realm than
urban (this is especially developed in the sketch,
"Cunner-Fishing"), and that single nature-women, such as Mrs.
Bonny, are often towers of spiritual strength. These ideas
became central to Jewett's picture of the rural world.

Another work that follows a plot
structure similar to Deephaven is "A Bit of Shore Life"
(1879) in which a Jewett persona journeys "up-country" where she
encounters again various exempla from whom she gains wisdom
before returning home. Once again the main people she meets are
women. Similarly, in "An Autumn Holiday" (1881) a young woman
wanders through the fields, meandering in her journey as the
narrative meanders to describe the rural setting in some detail.
Finally, she reaches an isolated home where two sisters sit
spinning. They begin reminiscing -- again a kind of gossipy oral
history commences -- finally focusing on the story of the addled
transvestite sea captain. While the story is highly comic, as
many of Jewett's are, there is nevertheless a moral message
implied -- that of wonder at human diversity -- and a piece of
wisdom gleaned -- that of the tenuous nature of gender identity,
an early Jewett concern.

A similar structure obtains in "The
Courting of Sister Wisby" (1887) where the urban
narrator-persona, again wandering in the country, encounters
Mrs. Goodsoe, an herbalist out gathering "mulleins." A lengthy
conversation ensues in which the two women show themselves to be
of different generations. Mrs. Goodsoe is of the older
matriarchal generation: she sustains the women's culture of
herb-medicine that she learned from her mother. She is opposed
to technological progress and to rapid transportation systems.
People should remain rooted in their home realms. Hers is the
voice of the traditional woman, where the younger urban woman
argues that some modern advances, such as opportunities for
travel, may be to the good. The story about Sister Wisby is
finally told, another in the genre of comic humanism, and
another that depicts a powerful country woman.

In some early pieces Jewett did not
even bother with the rudiments of plot seen in these stories.
"An October Ride" (1881) and "A Winter Drive" (1881) involve
excursions by the woman narrator into nature where she
experiences meditational epiphanies, but where nothing per se
happens -- again a static or cyclical pattern. Similarly, "The
Landscape Chamber" (1887) describes the travels of a young
horsewoman and the dismal exempla she encounters on her circular
journey. In "The King of Folly Island" (1888) the persona is a
man, but the plot structure is the same.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
relies on an homologous structure. The Jewett persona comes to
the country from the city seeking, it appears, spiritual
regeneration and artistic inspiration. In the course of her stay
she discovers a land of timeless rituals, a land that seems to
have escaped the processes of historical progress: it seems a
place where time has frozen into space. The farther up country
one goes the closer one comes to a transcendent realm: indeed,
the land between the living and the dead that is described in
Littlepage's story is located in the Arctic.

Mrs. Todd, the central personage, is,
like Mrs. Goodsoe, a matriarch rooted in her world, the
transmitter of the matrilineal traditions of herbal lore. The
people the narrator meets or whom she learns about, such as
Joanna, serve as exempla of diverse human experience and provide
her with moral wisdom -- sometimes about the human condition,
often more specifically about women's situation. Here, as
throughout Jewett's works, the narrator-persona remains a kind
of passive recorder, rather than an active participant in events
-- though in Pointed Firs she evinces a strong desire
to do so and briefly participates in the ceremonials at the
Bowden family reunion. Nevertheless, she is fundamentally cut
off from this world, and must return in the end to her urban,
modern world.

The layers of narrative in these
Jewett works suggests the remove the modern (late
nineteenth-century) woman is from the transcending matriarchal
realm. The meandering series of conversations serve the symbolic
purpose of illustrating the psychological distance the urban
woman is from the gynocentric world of the traditional woman --
the mother -- and of the sacred female space that is her world.

In "The Foreigner" (1900), for
example, a late sequel to Pointed Firs, the story is
structured similarly to the Joanna episode in the earlier work:
Mrs. Todd, the narrator, and a visitor are sitting around a
Franklin stove gossiping. Gradually in the process of
reminiscing the central story, told by Mrs. Todd, emerges. It
concerns a moment in which the transcendent literally erupts
into the everyday: "the foreigner's" dead mother appears at her
daughter's death-bed to carry her "home." This was probably
Jewett's most literal depiction of a transcendent, salvific
mother. It remains at a considerable remove from the everyday,
urban, modern world of the narrator, buried, as it is, within
layers of narrative.

Several stories involve cyclical
transits within the rural world. "A Late Supper" (1878), a
humorous early story, entails an inadvertent trip taken by
Catherine Spring. When unexpected guests arrive for dinner she
runs to a neighbor's farm for cream. On the way back her way is
blocked by a train. As she steps aboard to cross over, the train
starts up. She must travel to the next stop and back before she
can return home for supper. On the way, however, she encounters
some women who provide her with a means out of financial
difficulties she had been experiencing. Thus, the plot concerns
a housebound woman whose circular journey serendipitously
results in a change of fortune; it is a stroke of the miraculous
in the everyday.

Other stories that follow a similarly
eventless cyclical pattern include "The Hiltons' Holiday"
(1893), "The Flight of Betsey Lane" (1893), and "The Guests of
Mrs. Timms" (1894). Betsey Lane travels all the way to
Philadelphia in her adventure, but she returns home to her
community in the end. Nothing has really changed, except that
like other Jewett travelers her moral horizons have been
broadened.

One of the most static of Jewett's
stories is one of her most brilliant: "Miss Tempy's Watchers"
(1888). The entire story takes place indoors one evening, in the
home of a dead woman. It consists in the conversation of two
woman in attendance at the wake. Through the conversation the
women achieve spiritual growth and experience a connection with
the transcendent through the effect of Tempy's spirit (not her
literal spirit in the sense of a ghost, but the spirit of
charity in which she lived her life).

Occasionally a character who is not a
Jewett persona comes to the rural world from the city. In this
pattern the rural world remains the emotional and spiritual
centrum. The structure is evident, comically, in "Miss Esther's
Guest" (1893), and more seriously in "A White Heron" (1886) and
"Martha's Lady" (1897). "A White Heron" involves the repudiation
of an urban intruder, so that the rural world remains intact.
The only events in the story are, again, a matter of moral
growth. The young girl learns more about her rural environment
in her ascent up the tree, and it is that knowledge that
provides her with the resolve to protect the life of the white
heron that the ornithologist seeks to kill. The story thus is a
static one of the preservation of a female sanctuary. As a
reverse Cinderella story "A White Heron" connects imagistically
to the Grimm version of the fairy tale, for, in the Cinderella
story a white bird emerges from the grave of the girl's mother;
in "A White Heron" the white bird similarly comes to symbolize
the world of the mothers.29

"Martha's Lady" is another static
story that takes place in a waiting mode. After forty years an
urban woman, to whom a rural servant woman has been devotedly
attached, returns "home" to Martha. The reunion of the women
constitutes the story's only event, but it too is a kind of
revelation of the sacred; it reveals the matriarchal
transcendence that emerges out of the female experience of
patience and resignation -- what Rabuzzi calls the traditional woman's "via
negativa."30

Jewett's "imaginative realism" thus
came close to symbolism in that it attempted to suggest a world
beyond the literal world of the realists, but it remained a
moral humanism in that it retained roots in the everyday world
of human experience. The plot structure that she developed was
uniquely appropriate for the transmission of her vision. It
entailed cyclical journeys of spiritual growth; in her most
significant works, these moral and sometimes physical journeys
are undertaken by alienated urban "daughters" seeking to
reconnect with and preserve the matriarchal world of traditional
rural "mothers," a realm of timeless ritual. It was an escape
from the masculine time of history into transcending feminine
space.

7 Carol Gilligan, "Woman's Place in
Man's Life Cycle," Harvard Educational Review, 49, No.
4 (1979), 442. In her In A Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1982), p. 19, Gilligan changed the term "inductive" to
"narrative." In a recent article, "Maternal Thinking," Feminist
Studies, 6 (1980), 342-67,Sara Ruddick has
contrasted maternal thinking with scientific (masculine) thought
patterns; the former expresses respect and "humility" before the
contextual environment, while the latter impose control. A
similar contrast is drawn by Evelyn Fox Keller in an article,
"Feminism and Science," Signs, 7 (1982), 589-602.Keller
cites a woman scientist's attitude as an example of a feminine
mode; that scientist urges "letting the material speak to you"
rather than "imposing" "an answer" upon it (p. 599).
Contemporary psychologists have also detected a feminine
tendency to "see" and respect the context of an event, rather
than lifting the phenomenon out of context and rearranging it
according to a prior paradigm (Joanna Rohrbach, Women,
Psychology's Puzzle [New York: Basic, 1979], p. 71). Allof these studies tend to suggest a feminine episteme that
respects the environmental context, that hesitates before
wrenching and reshaping that environment. Such a sensitivity
seems to be present in Jewett's theory of the artist who does
little to reshape reality. For a further discussion of this
direction in modern feminist thought see my Feminist Theory:
The Intellectual Traditions, 3d. ed (New York: Continuum,
2000).
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11 Jewett vacillated about this
novel. In a later unpublished letter she recanted her criticism,
saying: "I take back [my belief] that the last half of the book
was not so good .... I still think that she wrote it, most of it
at her very best height . . ." (Sarah Orne Jewett to Annie Adams
Fields, n.d., Houghton MS bMS 1743.1 [117] 14; cited by
permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University).
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14 This advice is cited variously
by Cather herself. See her 1922 preface to Alexander's
Bridge and also her essay, "Miss Jewett," in Not
Under Forty, (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 88.
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15 As cited in Cather's 1925
preface to The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett.
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16 Jewett is citing an unnamed
literary critic in her comment on Thackeray.
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17 LaSalle Corbell Pickett, Across
My Path: Memories of People I Have Known (New York:
Brentano's, 1916), p. 145.
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18 While Jewett admired Wordsworth
and shared many of his critical ideas -- especially the
essentially democratic ideal of poetry found in the preface to
the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (see Donovan, Sarah
Orne Jewett, pp.133-34), her concept of nature
and of the rural world as a source of spiritual knowledge is
different from his. A thorough comparison of the two perceptions
would require another article; suffice to note here that
Wordsworth's "intimations of immorality" are rooted within the
poet's soul, where for Jewett such intimations come from beyond
the self. Wordsworth and the romantics pose a heroically
egocentric artist that contrasts quite markedly with Jewett's
view. For a further discussion of Jewett's ideas about
transcendence, see Josephine Donovan, "A Woman's Vision of
Transcendence: A New Interpretation of the Works of Sarah Orne
Jewett," Massachusetts Review, 21, No. 2 (1980), 365-80
and "Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange." Hypatia
11, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 947-80.
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26 See especially Rabuzzi, pp.
143-51. I have paraphrased and condensed her thesis somewhat,
but I trust I have remained faithful to it. Another recent
article that draws somewhat similar distinctions is Julia
Kristeva, "Women's Time," Signs, 7, No. 1 (1981),
13-35.
The transformation of time into space
is another formal and thematic concern of the modernists that
seems to express a fundamentally feminine sensibility. On this
direction see Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature,"
Sewanee Review, 13, No. 2 (Apr.-June 1945), 221-40; No.
3 (July-Sept. 1945), 433-56, and No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1945), 643-61,
and Nathan A. Scott, Jr., The Broken Center, Studies in the
Theological Horizon of Modern Literature (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1966), chap. 2, "Mimesis and Time in Modern
Literature."
Probably their "feminine" tendencies
are due to the fact that the modernists were rebelling against a
rigidly patriarchal literary tradition. In any event, Jewett
anticipated some of their directions.
[ Back ]

27 See especially Donovan, New
England Local Color Literature, pp.99-138.
[ Back ]

Editor's notes for this edition.Josephine Donovan is the author of
Sarah Orne Jewett (1980; rev. ed., 2001), New
England Local Color Literature (1983), and other books
and articles. A complete list of her publications is
available on her web site: http://nasa.umeres.maine.edu/~Josephine.Donovan.
She
is Emerita Professor of English, University of Maine.

This essay was written especially for Gwen Nagel, Editor, Critical
Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984
(pp. 212-225). Copyright (c) 1984 by Josephine
Donovan. Reprinted by permission. This essay may not be
reprinted without permission of the author.Josephine
Donovan made a few minor corrections and additions for the
online publication of this text.
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